The heritage of peace - Part 2

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At a colloquium held in September 2002 to discuss a foundational Anabaptist document in light of the first anniversary of 9/11, John Dey discussed with other Mennonite pastors the conflicts among members of his own church in Ohio.

Some, especially veterans, Dey said, preferred military action. Their willingness to speak out, often supported by prevailing public opinion outside the church, at times caused other members more committed to nonviolence to feel marginalized.

The document about which Mennonites, including pastors and theologians, gathered at Goshen College in Indiana was the Schleitheim Confession. The confession, which is 475 years old, sets down beliefs and behaviors that have been subscribed to by Anabaptists since Swiss churchmen met and produced it. Among the articles of the confession are some that decline involvement in secular government and promote nonviolence.

Mennonites, along with Amish and Hutterites, are among the Anabaptist sects. The three provide examples of varying degrees to which the confession may be implemented as a rule of practice. Toward the end of literalism are the Amish, with their austere, insular, communal life, denying all but the fewest modernities.

About in the middle are the Hutterites, also communal and insular, but more likely to adopt advantageous technologies.

The Mennonites take a serious view of the confession, but provide a more or less public face for Anabaptists. And so they found themselves in Goshen and in Washington, D.C., almost simultaneously. On Sept. 12, 2002, Jim Schrag, executive director of the Mennonite Church USA, was part of a press conference featuring churches and religious organizations opposing the possiblity of U.S. military action against Iraq.

To underscore his mission, Schrag presented the White House with a stack of signed petitions gathered from 246 churches in 33 states over two weeks. The signatures - more than 12,000 - provided "evidence of a church that wants to speak with one congregational voice on peacemaking," Schrag said.

Schrag's enthusiasm is not in question, but, among themselves, Mennonites agree their peace witness and ideological non-nationalism have undergone serious tests.

Besides Schrag, Anabaptists have found a public voice in Stanley Hauerwas, a theologian who teaches at Duke University's Divinity School in Durham, N.C. A major influence in Hauerwas' theological matriculation was the late John Howard Yoder, an Anabaptist theologian.

Time magazine, in conferring the title "Best Theologian" on Hauerwas in 2001, described him as "contemporary theology's foremost intellectual provocateur" and, given his ebullient, volatile personality, "an unlikely pacifist." The radical doctrine of peace he learned from Yoder turned him away also from nationalism, not sparing patriotism.

That was before 9/11. After the attacks, Hauerwas had to admit to experiencing the inward struggle many others may have felt. In an essay titled, "Sermons After Tuesday: A Postscript," he wrote:

"The horror, the terror, the strange beauty of the violence on Sept. 11 calls for a response, a violent response. Being a pacifist does nothing to free me from the desire to set things right by punishing those who perpetrated such an outrage. Conflicted, I remain silent, fearing that any words I say would suggest a confidence I do not have."

"I've always worried," Hauerwas told the Mennonite Weekly Review, "that if I were really tested, I wouldn't be any good. And there is a kind of testing in this."

A proof of that test, for Hauerwas, may have been seen when he left a Methodist church where he had worshipped in favor of a nearby Episcopal congregation. The main factor in his decision was the Methodist church's discomfort with his anti-war stance. As it turned out, 9/11 did not affect his peace-witness commitment.

"There has been no peace witness in the mainstream churches," he told the Review. "The lack of resistance to U.S. foreign policy is disturbing."

As it has been seen, the presence of such resistance within, at least, Mennonite churches has provided some disturbance of its own. The Goshen colloquium gave some evidence of the struggle.

"Is the sword always on the side of darkness?" asked a student participant.

Still, as it was with Hauerwas, so has it seemed with the Mennonites. Rather than falling into lockstep with more mainstream denominations that may tend to favor the current tack of national foreign policy, they look to the principles underlying the Schleitheim Confession.

At Goshen, Richard Kauffman, a journalist and former pastor, summed it up: "We need to think about how it is that God deals with violence . . . with love." The doctrine of nonviolence, Kauffman said, "is not an idea . . . but a way of life."

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